On 22 December 2007 17:04:57 Eddie Hung wrote: > Hello all, > > I'm a recent convert to libfprint - after having tried pam_bioapi and > pam_thinkfinger on my IBM Thinkpad, and I must say that, even at this > early stage of libfprint, it seems to work a lot better than the other > two solutions - and for that I must commend the author! > > Allow me to make a few comments regarding things that aren't quite > working as well as expected. I have done a quick search on the > archives, and they don't seem to mention some of the issues I'm about > to outline here. > > - gksu > A very big problem that afflicts both pam_thinkfinger and pam_bioapi > (and most other non-password-based PAM modules) would be > incompatibility with gksu. The main factor behind this is that gksu is > simply a wrapper around the console based sudo - and isn't capable of > interpreting anything but a simple "Password:" prompt from PAM. I have > looked into this extensively, and even hacked gksu a little to allow > the user to not give up if the first PAM module isn't pam_unix.so, so > that it can fallback onto the standard password prompt - but that > isn't the most elegant solution. Has the author, or anyone else, put > any thought into this - because I'd very much like to solve this > problem! > > - GDM > A slight annoyance is that GDM seems to require you to click OK on a > prompt that only appears *after* I've logged in - but I think this one > has been brought up before, and seems to be a problem with GDM. Any > solutions? > > - Login without username? > This was a very useful feature that was possible using pam_bioapi and > the UPEK binary driver - by swiping your finger, the module would fill > in your username *and* password for you - meaning you could login > completely without lifting more than one finger (tee hee!) - is that > something that could be done? > > - pam_gnome_keyring.so > This is a module which unlocks the GNOME keyring with the same > password as used to login by GDM. But if you're not logging using a > password, then obviously this module won't work. An interesting > feature I noted with pam_bioapi (though I never did get it to work) > was that it claimed to be able to release a password upon > fingerprinting - which would be extremely useful in this scenario. Of > course, this is very much a wishlist item than anything else that I'm > merely putting up for discussion - and of course the most elegant > solution would to be to get gnome-keyring to use PAM to begin with. > > - Visual feedback? > Another thing that I rather liked about the UBEK binary was that it > could give you visual feedback as to the swiping process (despite it > looking pig ugly and windows-like!) - i.e. whether you swiped too > fast, whether it was too far left or right, or that it failed - this > would be something that would be nice to see, too! > > I hope I'm not sounding too imposing by demanding all of these > features be implemented right away - far from it: I'm just putting > them up for discussion - and being a developer myself, would like to > contribute, too! > > Thanks for reading, and please give your comments/feedback/guidance as > to how I can help!
Hi there, almost all issues that you've mentioned above is gdm\gksu\other apps issues, not libfprint\pam_fprint. Same thing for kde\kdm\kdesu. I hope I'll take implementation of libfprint\pam_fprint integration in KDE as my academic project (if university will approve it). So be patient ;) Regards Vasily _______________________________________________ fprint mailing list [email protected] http://lists.reactivated.net/mailman/listinfo/fprint
